NYT article on videogame exercise

The New York Times article on videogame fitness trainers came out, and it's great! I don't know why I'm surprised any time newspaper articles are accurate, but everything there I had anything to do with is correct. The article covers Yourself!Fitness and Eyetoy:Kinetic in some detail, and I got to provide color commentary:

IT'S not every personal trainer who inspires a client to write poetry in her honor. But after a few weeks of training with doe-eyed Maya, Glen Raphael couldn't help but extol her virtues in verse: "Sweet Maya never sleeps or even tires/I rarely get a sense that she perspires."

Hey! I'm a published poet! Coool!

Posting such ardent poetry might be embarrassing — if Maya could actually read it.

Or...if an excerpt were published in newspapers around the world so everyone else could read it. That also might be embarrassing. [the full poem, cheesy as it is, may be found here.]

But Maya is not a real person; she is a computer-simulated woman designed to be an ideal trainer. "She's my personal trainer," said Mr. Raphael, 38, a software engineer in San Francisco. "She just happens to live in my television."

Yup! Read the whole thing.

[cross-posted with blogjack.net]